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By Chris Robideaux
The health benefits of drinking tea have been known for eons, and today these benefits are enjoyed by perhaps billions of Earth’s people. Tea reduces stress, provides multiple antioxidant elements, socializes people, and provides countless jobs for those working in the tea manufacturing industry (providing livelihoods is good health, too!). The Chinese are most likely the first people to recognize the life-enhancing effects of tea, and early on established tea drinking and cultivating as an integral part of their culture.
Tea has much less caffeine than coffee, that other, more dubious, favorite morning jump-start drink. Clinical studies have shown that green tea, in particular, can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer, as well as aid in enhancing bone density, cognitive functioning, while also helping with weight loss and digestion (University of Geneva, Switzerland, Nov. 1999 study). Also, there’s a good chance tea may reduce your risk of heart attack and stroke, by “cleaning” your arterial walls. A Dutch study over a five and a half year span found that there was a 70% reduced risk of fatal heart attack in those who drank two to three cups of black tea per day.
Some of the other health effects of drinking tea regularly are: It strengthens your bones, thanks to the phytochemicals found in it. Studies have shown that tea drinkers who drank it regularly for ten years or more had much stronger bones than their counterparts. A better smile is likely, too. Tea contains tannins and fluoride that help protect the teeth. It contains polyphenols, which help fight off cancer. It helps bolster your immune system and fight off infections. Tea is also a good way to hydrate your body, is calorie-free, and increases your metabolism. If ever there was a ritual to have, drinking plenty of tea is it!
By Chris Robideaux
Darjeeling tea
There are many different kinds of easy-to-make tea recipes, pertaining to most every kind of tea leaf on the planet. There are recipes for brewing chai – a particularly popular recipe subject – as well as those for cooking tapioca for ‘bubble tea”, which includes brown sugar, honey and tapioca pearls, and is also very popular at the moment. There are quick and easy tea smoothie recipes, as well as those that can be found on comprehensive web sites that add information about proper water filtration, where to acquire the best quality teas, along with history, growing and botanical information about the various teas.
There are, of course, many e-commerce web sites where you can purchase tea recipe books, if you want to go a step beyond finding good free recipes online or in a library book. There are sites with blogs where tea aficionados regularly share their own favorite tea recipes. There are books aimed at true connoisseurs, as well as ones designed for novices. Tea can be compared to wine, in terms of the varietals and types of crops that can be cultivated and enjoyed. On at least one web site, Darjeeling tea is compared to the French Burgundy grape because of the shared worldwide demand and relatively small supply.
Overall, it is quite easy for the tea lover to find what he or she is looking for in terms of methods of making quality tea beverages. There are recipes available for literally every marketable tea leaf in the world, and which can be found in numerous books and literature in libraries, bookstores, and certain tea shops themselves. Quality tea recipes for all manner of tea types are simply a search term and a click away from web savvy tea lovers, to the greater enjoyment of this perennial and popular beverage.
[Editor's note: Our blog is chock full of great articles on this topic. Use our search feature to find them!]
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Great news, everybody! English Tea Store has decided to spread the word about its great-tasting tea and nifty tea accessories by giving stuff away! Just convince five of your friends to follow ETS on Twitter and you’ll be entered to win the following: a 2-cup Ceramic Infuser Teapot (you pick the color) and a sampling of each of these teas (choose between loose leaf and teabags):
- Buckingham Palace Garden Party
- English Breakfast Tea Blend No. 1
- Double Bergamot Earl Grey Tea
- Peppermint Tea
- Blackcurrant Herbal Tea (only teabags, sorry)
For every five friends you convince to follow us, you’ll be entered to win! So, if you convince ten friends, you’ll be entered twice! Convince 15 friends, and you’ll be entered three times!
Every time you round up five friends, shoot me an e-mail to: etscontests@gmail.com. Make sure to include the Twitter usernames of each of your friends so that I can verify that they’ve indeed followed us.
The winner’s name will be plucked randomly from a teapot! A congratulatory e-mail will be sent to the winner on January 7, 2010. The lucky guy or gal will have until Monday the 11th to claim the prize. Otherwise, we’ll pick another name! Once the prize has been claimed, I’ll post the winner’s name on Twitter as well.
Thanks for all your support! You’re awesome!
By Alexandra Hoover
For people looking to improve their well-being, drinking hibiscus tea is a good option. Not only is it tasty, but hibiscus tea can help alleviate heart problems. Clinical trials have demonstrated that consuming hibiscus tea is extremely healthy for people. The more cups a day people drink, the better it is for their health.
Why Drink it?
In The Journal of the Science of Food Agriculture, researchers presented information on how hibiscus tea, or Hibiscus sabdariffa, helps manage cholesterol, demonstrating that it reduces one’s chance of developing heart disease. Hibiscus extract lowers the cholesterol of lab animals, which has vast implications for human beings, as well.
Cardiovascular Well-being
If you have heart disease or fear getting it, drinking hibiscus tea can be helpful for a number of reasons. First of all, hibiscus tea contains antioxidants, which reduce cancer by eliminating free radicals, or cellular by-products. Also, hibiscus tea can reduce blood pressure, helping to reduce one’s risk of developing any kind of cardiovascular disease.
Have a Healthy Diet
If you don’t eat well, it can be hard to combat or evade heart disease. In addition to drinking hibiscus tea, one must also eat nutritious meals regularly. Try drinking a glass of hibiscus tea before or after a healthy serving of food to help prevent heart disease.
Exercise Daily
When people are kind to their bodies by eating well and getting regular physical activity, they don’t have to rely solely on one factor, like drinking hibiscus tea to help prevent heart disease. Hibiscus tea can only be powerful as an aid–it cannot be entirely responsible for improving ones strength and well-being.
Try Alternate Teas
Green tea and white tea are also consumed for their antioxidant benefits. Drink white or green tea for variety. White tea and green tea extract are also quite useful in preventing cancer or bacterial/viral infections.
By Kathy McCarthy [reposted from our sister blog]
PG Tips Pyramid Teabags
A pyramid teabag is exactly what it sounds like, a teabag in the shape of a pyramid. Introduced a little over ten years ago, this teabag was thought to be an improvement over the traditional pocket-shaped teabag because the pyramid shape gives the tea leaves more room to expand while steeping. Another advantage to pyramid teabags is that they can hold whole tea leaves, thus delivering a higher quality tea to the consumer while retaining the convenience of a teabag.
Unfortunately, the first pyramid teabags ran into a little problem in that they were deemed unfriendly to the environment because their synthetic material would not break down in landfills. Loose tea leaves and paper teabags are environmentally friendly. However, pyramid teabags have since been updated to use a sustainable woven mesh that is biodegradable.
Enjoying a cup of tea brewed from premium tea leaves in a pyramid teabag lets you enjoy the “real deal”. Unlike the tea fines and dust that are packaged into the regular pocket teabags, you can enjoy the rich, smooth flavor of tea brewed from the whole tea leaf when using a pyramid teabag.
Pyramid teabags brew a superior cup of tea because the unique pyramid shape of the bag provides enough room for the tea leaves to unfurl and release their full flavor. Water easily circulates around the tea leaves allowing for an optimum infusion.
It is actually a little entertaining to watch the leaves unfurl as they steep, and the pyramid teabag is just as convenient to use as a regular pocket teabag. Since the pyramid shape can easily house premium loose leaf tea, you enjoy a much higher quality cup of tea than you can get from the traditional teabag.
The pyramid teabag is an innovative brewing system combining the traditional teabags’ convenience with loose leaf tea’s superior aroma and taste.
By Stephanie Harkins [reposted from our sister blog]
Oolong Tea
Just getting acquainted with the wide, wide world of tea? Have you only just started to branch out beyond the familiarity of bagged tea or realized that tea comes in a lot more varieties than black or green? Tea can be very intimidating to someone just learning about it, because there are more varieties out there than one could possibly imagine.
All teas, no matter what their variety, come from the same plant – Camellia Sinensis. If the beverage does not have any Camellia Sinensis in it, it is not a real “tea”, but instead is termed a tisane or an herbal tea, even though there is no tea in it. Rooibos tea and Yerba Mate are both popular new drinks on the tea scene which fall into this category as they have no real “tea” in them.
So once you realize that all teas come from the same plant, the rest is easy because then the main difference is in oxidization levels. Black tea has the most oxidization, followed by Oolongs, then Green Tea and finally White Teas which are either lightly oxidized, or more commonly not oxidized at all.
No matter what type of tea you are drinking, it is either flavored tea or unflavored tea.
There are a few unique types of tea in the world of tea. Kukicha is one of these teas. Still produced from the Camellia Sinensis plant, Kukicha uses the stems and twigs of the tea plant, instead of using tea leaves.
Kukicha is often roasted, which is a popular process to change the flavor of different teas. Genmaicha is a roasted green tea with roasted brown rice which has a popcorn-like aroma and flavor which is incredibly delicious. Another roasted tea is Hojicha which is roasted green tea leaves. Lapsang Souchong is the strongest of the roasted teas, with a gorgeous smoked aroma and rich flavor that is full of campfire smoke and heavy woodsy notes.
Not only can the flavor of tea be altered by roasting, but also by age. Pu-erh tea has only gained popularity in the west in the recent past. Most teas decline with age, becoming less and less flavorful with age and taking on a progressively dull color. However Pu-erh is a rare tea which is actually enhanced with age, and the older the Pu-erh, the more valuable it is. Pu-erh tea is hard to classify and is definitely in a category of it’s own, and its complexities may prove to be interesting to those new to different varieties of tea.
Those represent the spectrum of teas in the tea world. There may be many different types of these teas, for example Earl Grey, a favorite in England falls into the category of a flavored tea, as it is simply a black tea (usually) with bergamot flavoring. Therefore simply by recognizing these main types of tea, you can easily identify most teas you come across.
Stephanie is the publisher of The Tea Review Blog.
By Stephanie Harkins [reposted from our sister blog]
It's not too early to start preparing for the holidays!
Tea can make a wonderfully flavorful addition to holiday festivities. And even though a pot of hot tea on a cold winter’s day is a delight indeed, there are also a few recipes that I myself have created with teas to make the holidays a bit more special.
Eggnog Spice Rooibos
Okay, true, this first recipe calls for rooibos, which isn’t technically a tea, but this is my favorite homemade recipe of 2009, so I’m including it in this collection for sheer good flavor.
- 1 cup of cold water
- 1 teabag of rooibos OR 1 tsp loose rooibosin an infuser
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- 1/4 tsp allspice
- 2 cups Eggnog
In a medium saucepan, add together the cold water and rooibos, and bring to a rolling boil. Add Eggnog and spices and heat to a point just below boiling (do not allow it to come to a boil). Pour immediately into mugs, garnish with cinnamon sticks and whipped cream with sprinkles of nutmeg.
Serves 2!
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Cinnamon Assam Cider
This festive drink uses the malty character of an Assam to compliment the apple cider and cinnamon.
- 1 tsp of Assam tea
- 1 tsp Cinnamon
- 1 cup of Apple Cider
- 3-4 cloves
Brew the Assam tea using apple cider instead of water to brew your tea. This, along with the added cinnamon and clove gives it the feel of mulling spices, a very delicious dark spicy brew in the fall and winter
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Hot Yuletide Cheer
My mother used to make this recipe around the holidays, so I can’t claim exclusive ownership of this recipe, however my mother made it every year at Christmas time, so it carries a lot of special memories with it.
- 1 1/2 cup water
- 6 bags or 6 tsp of black tea
- 1 broken/chipped cinnamon stick
- 3 Whole cloves
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 1/4 cup cranberry or pomegranate juice
- 1 cup Burgundy wine (can be replaced with grape juice)
- Orange slices with 2-3 cloves placed in each for both flavor and visual appeal
In a large saucepan, bring the water to a rolling boil. Add the black tea in teabags or using an infuser to steep the tea for approximately 5 minutes along with the cinnamon pieces and cloves in the saucepan. After 5 minutes, remove the teabags, and stir in the sugar, cranberry or pomegranate juice and wine or grape juice. Serve hot in mugs with the orange slices as a garnish.
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Merry Matcha Cookies
Matcha is fabulous in anything – tea, food, candy, you name it! This recipe utilizes the delicious flavor and nutrition of matcha to create festive holiday cookies.
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 4-6 TBSP of Matcha, depending on how strong you want the cookies to be
- 2 large egg yolks
- 1 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 cup of soft butter
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- Red Decorating Sugar (optional)
Combine dry ingredients (salt, baking powder, matcha, flour) together in a large mixing bowl, then set aside. Then in a different large mixing bowl, cream together the sugar and butter, beating in the egg yolks and vanilla extract as you go. Gradually fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and mix well – resulting dough will be sticky. Cover with plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator for one hour.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and lightly grease 2 baking sheets. Using a rolling pin, roll out the chilled dough on a lightly floured surface to a thickness of about 1/4 inch. Using holiday-themed cookie cutters, cut out shapes from the dough, decorate with your decorating sugar and place about an inch apart on the greased baking sheets.
Bake for 10-13 minutes until lightly golden on top then allow to cool.
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As you can see, tea makes a versatile treat for holiday recipes!
Stephanie is the publisher of The Tea Review Blog, a great place to learn more about tea!
By Stephanie Harkins
Tea tasting, much like wine tasting, cheese tasting or any other sampling of a food or beverage, includes utilizing all five of your senses and focusing on how the experience feels to you personally.
Loose Leaf Tea
By using your sense of smell, sight, taste and touch, you can not only evaluate teas accurately, but you can improve the experience of enjoying the tea that you are brewing. You may also decide to hold tea tasting parties amongst friends for fun, or even pursue a career as a professional tea taster for a large tea factory.
There are four main points to consider when evaluating the quality of a tea during a tea tasting; the dry leaves, the unfurled (spent) leaves, the aroma of both of these, and of course the most important aspect to consider – flavor.
When examining the dry leaves, consider their aroma, their appearance, and the way they feel. One can tell a lot about a tea from simply examining the dry tea leaves, saving yourself from purchasing low quality teas in some tea shops.
How do they smell? How do they feel? Newer teas are slightly springier while older teas are crumbly. Usually the older the tea, the more crumbly they are. The tea leaves should be actual leaves without any stalks, fibers or dust. Look for leaves which are shiny and fresh, without any dullness or uneven coloring.
The unfurled, spent leaves look like beautiful completely whole leaves in higher quality teas. Sometimes the brewed leaves can even be eaten in recipes as an appetizers. But the spent leaves also often reflect the quality of the tea, and the aroma of the leaves and the brewed tea are also important to the overall impression of the tea.
Finally, it is above everything else important to consider the flavor of the brewed tea. Everything else you consider in a tea is only a good indication of what you can expect from a tea, however the flavor of the tea is the main point in evaluating a tea.
When officially taste testing a tea, bring a spoonful of the warm tea to your lips and slurp in the tea in a manner that it covers the entire tongue, then gently swirl the tea around in your mouth. Suck in air in short bursts in your mouth to be able to sense the more delicate characteristics of the tea, as well as it’s subtle undertones.
When you have evaluated all of these points, it is a good idea to record your impressions in a tea notebook. As your knowledge of tea expands, so will your ability to characterize teas based on your initial evaluations of it’s appearance, aroma and flavor.
Stephanie is the publisher of the Tea Review Blog. Check it out today!
By Kathy McCarthy
While you do not give much thought to an ordinary spoon as you stir your warm cup of tea on a blustery winter’s eve, teaspoons can tell the story of the ages. Many collectors use spoons in their collections as an historic reference hearkening back to significant changes, either political, social or technological.
Many tea spoons have political motifs, and their styles change to reflect the times. The alloys added to the metal can also change the composition of a silver spoon over time. Some collectors look for very specific types of spoons, while other collectors pick up spoons marking their travels.
When you first begin collecting spoons you may gravitate towards graphically interesting spoons, and as you become a seasoned collector, your collection criteria will become more refined. After you have been collecting for a number of years, you will very likely find yourself in the position of looking for a particular spoon to round out your collection.
There are many ways to go about collecting spoons. Some collections can be fun. Some collections can help you relive your travels, and some collections can be worth a lot of money. If you choose to collect antique sliver spoons, you may wind up with not only a beautiful collection but a valuable one as well.
Silver tea spoons are still available from back as far as the 14th century, so if you are only collecting back as far as the 19th century, you will find that not only are the silver teaspoons very accessible, but they are affordable as well. Of course there are huge ladles that can get to be pretty expensive, but the smaller tea and spice spoons still fit most budgets.
As you are deciding which teaspoons to add to your collection, remember that even if you are building a valuable teaspoon collection, at the end of the day, you should have fun while doing it. So enjoy the spoons, the stories that go along with them, and of course with it all enjoy your favorite cup of tea.
By Kathy McCarthy
While it would be ideal if you could wrap tea up, put it on the shelf and have it ready for you whenever you wanted it, unfortunately it is not quite that simple. While tea can last a good, long time if you store it properly, it does not last forever.
White tea has the shortest shelf life. It will only survive in pristine condition about a month. Green tea will hold its freshness for about three months, and black tea can survive untainted for about a year. The caveat here is that these survival rates only apply if the tea is “stored properly” in ideal conditions.
The ideal condition for storing tea is in a container in a cool, dry, dark place. Tea begins to lose its flavor when it is exposed to air, moisture, odor, light or heat. So when you decide to store your favorite tea in a Tupperware container in your cupboard, you are on the right track, but plastic absorbs smells and lets odors in as well. So plastic containers or zip lock bags and glass are not good storage solutions.
The best type of storage container for tealeaves is an airtight tin. To be truly airtight a tin with a double lid works best. Then you want to keep the tin in a cool, dry place.
You never want to store tea in the refrigerator, because condensation, even in the slightest amounts, will begin to mold the tealeaves. And since tea really absorbs any odor that it is around, you want to store it away from other fragrant foods like coffee and spices as well. So remember that your container needs to be not just waterproof but odor proof as well. That means that your cool, dry cupboard may indeed be the best place to store your tea in an airtight, odor proof and waterproof container.
